Hacker News Reader

Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Derren Brown.

I feel he is happy with people leaving his shows believing in psuedo-scientific nonsense, it's just a different brand of nonsense.

I'd be interested in a poll of people leaving his shows being asked if they thought it was a) mostly traditional magic / sleight of hand or b) Psychology, influence, whatever nonsense Brown calls his stuff nowadays.

I might be wrong, but I think most would go with with b)

View on HN

Derren Brown is in a weird space for me. On stage, he mixes his very heavy skepticism with other claims of pseudoscience, and the two can be a bit muddled. He does always say that what he does is a trick and "honestly dishonest", but obscures how he does it. Off stage, he rails against any thought that things like NLP or subliminal suggestion works, but people might not be aware of that.

I don't doubt that at least a small portion of what he does is very similar to what the author of the article describes, with cold-reading and just a good understanding of people, but there's plenty of traditional stage magic with it. I also don't doubt that he would never go on stage with a trick that couldn't be performed correctly 100% percent of the time.

To me NLP always felt more like mysticism than science.

It's absolutely considered pseudoscience by most people, including Derren Brown himself [0].

[0]: http://derrenbrown.co.uk/claim-claim-2/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com